Sometimes hanging on til you know you cannot beat a PB for sure can pay off. You can get much better luck then you might expect, or perform better than before. Or the unusual might occur and by nothing you intended to do could cause a time save. Like a boss getting stuck on a corner, or some other odd glitch occurs that is beneficial. Had that happen once or twice.

"In addition, anywhere from 12-14 STR does the exact same thing. There's not another change until 16 STR."

Str is just for attack right?

"AGI + INT + Weapon Initiative + random[0,9]"

Lol you are telling me the equipped Weapon itself changes that queue order? Was not expecting that. What is the Weapon Initiative? Is that the "Effectiveness" listed in the weapon section here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/587676-swords-and-serpents/faqs/21153 ?

"If character creation counted for time I might be a little more open to this, but as much as it sucks to have to roll the characters up every time, it's the only way to legitimately start a new game"

Right. This is why I am thinking it might need a new category. The difference is less than half a minute looks like though.

"Not everyone wants to use those 4 names"

The reason I chose those default names is because when you choose to "continue" it prefills those names. Also easier to identify which character got what. So for the sake of input speed that would be faster. Otherwise I would have ALL very vulgar names for sure!

"If anyone wants to experiment with other parties, they still have to roll the characters themselves. "

Yes. That is how that would work.

"Then we have the issue of whether their passwords are legit."

Well it is kind of bothersome to check I guess. But once a set of codes is verified they should be good moving forward. I am not thinking there is going to be much variation here considering that the speedrunners for Any% all use this setup anyway. I did create a set a of videos of the creation and verification from a hard reset. Also...I am not expecting people to be rushing to create a set of codes with all 14 stats. It was...interesting. Not sure if I am right, but each stat has 12 possibles in a set of 3. So that would be like (1/12)^3, then you have to do that 4 separate times. So like (1/12)^3 +(1/12)^3 + (1/12)^3 + (1/12)^3 = 1/6912 probability of creating a party with all 14 stats. So this is not something to be done casually by any means.

However I will say that the starting state of the characters and party are no different from a brand new party. Standard class equipment, 0 exp, rank 1.

Also keep in mind that if a brand new party uses the party suicide move "Last Resort" on the first tile of the game you immediately go to the Temple.

Thanks for the feedback.

Here is what a run with this passcode set looks like. All forced enounters hit, all locked doors need to be unlocked, all spells need to be learned. Also the glitch boss ending works as well.

So I have just legitimately created a starting save file where each character has all stats as 14. I did notice that when you input the code you start at the temple! Not sure if that would have to be a different category. Here are my reasons for why it should at least be allowed.

1. Unfortunately I have found through my testing that Intelligence and Agility combined influence your queue order, your hit rate, your evasion, and possibly running. The one with the worse stat consistently gets slammed more than the others. 2.Sometimes I do not feel like submitting to the RNG gods.
2. Everyone can be on the same playing field with these starting codes.
3. Community expansion would be more easily achieved due to easier access.
4. The time difference between starting at the temple compared to the normal start seems to be around 15-20 seconds when I tested in favor of the temple so not a great difference, but it does exist.
5. This state was legitimately created in about 1 hour and a 30 minutes of rolling over and over again, so no cheating of any sort was involved.
6. Also with these all 14 starting stats shorter times should be possible, refining the game further (maybe).
7. Nice to have the characters have actual names

Let me talk about the PITA that is the passwords in Swords and Serpents. Now I understand why as a small child I could never figure it out. And why maybe sometimes I would rather get something close to good with the rolling rather than input it all in.

1. The name needs to be the included in order for a character password to be valid. Ex: name of IAGO with Password xxxPASSxxx.
2. The Game Password somehow uses the other passwords to generate it. This means that if you create 3 all 14 stat characters, but then later want to replace one with the other character you CANNOT. The Game Password will not be accepted.
3. However the order of the characters can be changed and it will still be valid.ex: Order of IAGO, MASK vs MASK, IAGO.

IAGO: 7TTTC6T7? Magician

MASK: BBBBV7CC? Magician

AJAX: HCCCV6C9K Thief

ERIN G???M72G? Thief

GAME PASS QJALS???3ZNUJ?

Thoughts?

English por favor. Google translate is giving me a strange translation about nerves.

EDIT: Seems like Intelligence also plays a in the below. Oh boy. Agility is the most important stat without question. That is not to say you should ignore the other stats, but if you watch this video you will understand how a party with very low agility will not make it far.

Agility does the following: Speed (Order of Attack, low agility rarely goes compared to high agility) Hit Rate% (Physical and Magical) Evasion (% of how often an enemy will miss an attack on you)

I have no experience trying to develop a community but I can at least comment on the guide itself. I think a guide like this depends on the audience and the game. If you are trying to sell it to new people you should probably just make a speedrun so people can see it. I have never heard of the game personally. However even for people familiar with the game a guide like this should go into a lot of detail especially on the time saving explanations. For instance, you say an enemy can be stun locked but do not describe how to go about doing that. I would say that is a very important detail. You state how things are across from each other but do not describe exactly how that is or what order is the fastest. Sometimes you describe what to do like "get a headshot", but in 3d games how to do that can require more detail like where on the map you should have your character, when they should be there, what weapon to use, etc. I do like maps, I think those are important so that is a good thing to have. But having a video is worth a thousand words.

@b9king Just want to make sure you do understand I am being sarcastic right? I recommend looking at almost any of the popular streamers of games and their layouts and then try emulate those to get something decent. I am listing those things above as things NOT to do.

@EmeraldAly These are my "favorites".

https://twitter.com/i/status/828785854881501185

Interesting, did not think you could actually modify the video dimensions in a layout.

@b9king Ok so I have some recommendations for a bad layout after looking at the masters!

1. Make sure to have the actual section with the video content is SMALL. Possibly distort its dimensions too.
2. Make sure to overlay something/s over the video section to make it very difficult to even make out what is behind it.
3. Have a Large section streaming a close up of your face. Everyone wants to see the runners face over the actual video content!
4. Have other images intruding upon the video section so it completely covers parts.
5. Make sure to have lots of gifs everywhere around it making it highly distracting and irritating.

Finally, you need to submit a speedrun to this site then have it rejected based on them not being able to fully watch/see the video. Then bitch like crazy saying it should be acceptable, but refuse to redo it on an acceptable layout.

Garbage https://giphy.com/gifs/dirty-work-norm-macdonald-trash-can-g1QXhpbtMsX9C https://giphy.com/gifs/dumpster-oYRSX77Fmq0lW https://giphy.com/gifs/funny-fail-collection-101zSb0Dslq0hy

@GoldenGemGames Not sure what you mean by .exe games. Could you clarify? For those super long runs I watch them in small bits. Maybe 30 minutes a day or so. No way I could just sit through 10+ hours. Finished watching a 5 hour Xenoblade Chronicles X speedrun this week that way.

@Matthew, I have not played that Red Dead Redemption, but skimming through it did not make me feel like it is that bad. It also seems active with several runners.

@Thebestaro There are worse choices than GTA.

@JDogindy 1 .I highly dislike games with poor controls, one of my most hated games is Battletoads (NES) for that reason. 2. Oh you mean like Swords and Serpents for the NES where your beginning stats are relatively important and you have to "roll" for them? That would be really irritating to have to do that for each attempt. 3. RPGs pretty much require grinding for stats. The trick is to find out to do it fast!

@SilentStorm shoot em ups can have their place, but they do not tend to be very exciting due to their auto scrolling nature.

@Komrade yup I think that genre may be the worst. Pretty pointless. What enjoyment could be had from having text fly by and only a couple other inputs like up or down and confirm for the entirety of the game? Those visual novels are supposed to be read...like a novel.

Did you run out of space? Also try again.

One reason to want to run games with no runs is to have fun routing them, and to understand the process of decreasing the time via iteration. Make a really basic route and get a max time. Then start examining how to improve it, and the time should start going down the more you run it. If you might want to go for a WR on some game that process of critical thinking might reveal ways of decreasing the time. I would say getting an WR should really be secondary goal though on popular games. Considering how disgustingly optimized some of those games are you will probably be looking at a minimum of several hundred hours of running those to even get close to the top times.

Also on games with no other records it is amusing for me to say "I have a world record in ___, but I am the only one to do any runs for the game!".

There is a DS emulator. I was using it to play a game awhile back and while I did have a couple graphical issues it was nothing that impacted the gameplay. Talk to your specific game's mods.

I am kind of curious to see what drama this guy caused on those Chinese sites aha. Probably nothing good. In other communities it usually takes a lot less than this to get banned. Just saying. I suppose it is difficult in practice to truly ban a person. IP bans are limited. There should be some kind of list of proxies to block too. However maybe some people use proxies in some countries just to connect...so I don't know if that would be a good solution.

@Kromer autoscrollers make for bad speedruns, but when there is variation you can get better times. Some shooter auto scrollers can be hard as hell, like Gradius III for Arcade where not dying would be incredible.

@Silo_Simon Having memes for a game does not make a game bad. You should state more specific reasons. A better reason would be that Mario Party can give you horrendous luck on some stages which can ruin your run and there is nothing you can do about it.

So you have 19 you want to run. If you have no preference then assuming that the first in the list is 1, and the last is 19, use this: https://www.random.org/ Min=1 Max=19

Then just run the game that corresponds to the number that came up.

That's a shame, was looking forward to seeing that seeing how much of an improvement it was over 2nd.

Any idea what happens in this case?

I guess you need to talk to the mods and find out why. Then just fix what they say is wrong I guess? There is a bit of a language barrier here...

Google Translate! Maybe this will get through to him.

“......再说一遍：你好，你好，virnes都是不允许的模拟器，所以这就足以拒绝你的跑步了。我已经多次解释了。而且，你的跑步受到严格审查，因为我们有一些关于未使用的东西的信息“。--garadas21

“通常Bizhawk，FCEUX，Nestopia，Mesen仿真器都可以接受......”-CLChambers00

https://www.speedrun.com/Astyanax/thread/d9h6m https://www.speedrun.com/Speedrunning/thread/h1jwd https://www.speedrun.com/Speedrunning/thread/sccx6

请停止在多个主题中发布相同的内容。 只接受遵循规则的运行。

显然，这个人还与Discord中的多个人谈过同一个主题。